miss_moose's Xanga

Monday, June 02, 2008

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 08:39:11 GMT

Valerie says that air conditioning was the death of the South. Well, it's been a couple days since ours broke, and I have mixed feelings. Our house was comfortably warm on Saturday, and felt much less artificial. Unused lights and computers were shut off because they produced heat, and the everlasting busy hum of them diminished. Forced to unify in the coolest part of the house instead of dispersing to our various solitary amusements, I and my family played games together at the kitchen table under a gale-force fan. We thought and moved less, and valued the breeze. Ice cream was a great treat. We were no longer air snobs, hoarding our own better air inside and thumbing our noses at the plebian atmosphere. With windows open for the slightest breath of freshness, we sheepishly mingled our once-expensive air with the rest of it.
All of this was quite nice, but then come the nights. My bed is dankly, hotly sticky no matter how I move. On Saturday night my open windows projected the sounds of a rowdy twenty-first birthday party in the yard behind ours until I finally shut them at 2 AM. There's a kind of quietness that sounds like heat. You can hear it when you shut the windows against the party and the outside air. I tried sleeping downstairs where it was cooler, but the living room floor was scratch-insecty against my skin through the thin blanket. I woke up more than I slept for several nights.
When the air conditioning gets fixed today, I'll miss the real-house feeling of no computers squealing and lights only in the necessary places. It was nice to play desultory games, to eat ice cream together, to have the windows open and move little. Maybe these things were the heart of the South that Valerie misses. But, gosh-darn-it, I want to sleep.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Wed, 21 May 2008 12:07:12 GMT

The closet was full even before I began to fill it. That's how it is sometimes.
Do not lose the perception of the beautiful behind things. Do not let it go for tired and partly untrue clarity. You have not grown wiser if you do.
"Life is a casting off," says Linda in Death of a Salesman. This is the kind of tired and partly untrue clarity I mean. The wisdom of it screams out because it holds off from happiness. You can stare the world in the face, aggrandizing yourself for recognizing its face and sad with more than an excuse. But wisdom is in the ridiculous decision to be happy even in the face of clarity that is really the mirror we see through dimly. The face you have been seeing is crumple-poxed in its bed with a fever. Stare at it all you want, memorize it, draw pictures of it, but then what will you have with the healing of the disease? Fevers fall, and then it will be you holding the inaccurate picture and your clarity will be a falsehood that was only temporarily and insignificantly true.
But what of those who are given as they grow only the less significant and time-bound truths to tell? The truely-true looms too large to write about. Then, often, silence. And we grow up and we joy when we can in life and laugh at what's funny and we do not write because there are few-words-and-already-written for the big truths and the small ugly-now truths are better left unwritten.
Searing visions of beauty come less than they did, but treasure them more and record them when you can.

Friday, May 02, 2008

Fri, 02 May 2008 09:31:45 GMT

Nothing could be more pitiful than a pitiable creature who does not see to pity himself, and weeps for the death that Dido suffered through love of Aeneas and not for the death he suffers himself through not loving You, O God, Light of my heart.
--Augustine, Confessions

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20:15:13 GMT

The days are blooming.
Today I stood beneath a flower tree in little wind and white fragrant petals dropped because it was their time. One fell on my head like a blessing. They were the beginning last week, delicate promises not to live to see the green-full across the sky. Daffodils are here and now and the pink trailing of those trees in the courtyard.
Blankets are the bloom on the grass these days, with tanning petals in all directions and unread homework dropping off them like pollen. Blossoming also, the thoughts and words wakened with the early-ing sun.
The days are blooming.
We are in the days.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 16:49:16 GMT

Dancing again, oh my it was good.
I've been aware of the Pittsburgh Scottish Country Dancers for a while, but have never been able to make it down.
Last night, Valerie and I drove the hour to visit their class. Oh what fun! They were so welcoming, and had a great beginning class that Valerie could jump into. We stayed for the next class so I could dance as well. Then they had tea. All of them seemed very excited to have us, and wanted to know where I had danced before. One of the instructors knew Moon and Torf. It's a small world for Scottish Country Dancers...
It felt so good!
We danced a great jig called The Snake Pass. Has anyone done it?

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:43:32 GMT

Better for Next Year, I Suppose

The salutation of green-cool grass between my toes startled me into spring.
The incandescent perfection of the End of a Thing penetrates my room where the treasure is of the time.
I walked here ceremony-slow across the grass, and here I tremble with things undone.
Never again this odd assembly, the hamburger-patttie box of tacky gold and "Ecce, Omnia Nova Facio."
In assent, a picture I tacked up in September just fell off the wall. It has begun again.
There was a scent of someone through a door as I treaded the hall. Someone I knew long ago. My nose cried familiarity to my brain, but my brain could not cry back a face or a name. And this will be the same.
But I am listening to a song. I have been listening to it all this time. Songs, not scents, sear places and people into my memory, wherein lies my hope for holding.
Now for the last jolt of this small slow race, the end, and the beginning. Sunset and May are almost here.

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 19:57:42 GMT

A Thought from the Theater

Theater and life weave through each other until one cannot come cleanly from the other. Actors bring their characters back through the warp within their heads to the world beyond the fresnels. A tech crew outside the shadows still seems to belong there. But the weaving is more than a coincidence of roles and personality. In the midst of a production, the play is a catching paradigm for the life around it. When I watched Waiting for Godot every day for a week, each conversation with a friend became a desperate non-sequitorial search for meaning. Strange combinations of cruelty and vulnerability wandered across my sight as I wasted time waiting for things never to come. Matchmaker made a small, luminous adventure out of a semester, and during La Bete the tension between the ideal, the reasonable, and the ridiculous crowded in on every side. The characters and situations, recycled before my eyes night after night, appear in the people I meet and the books I read, in the week's new couple or the day's small tragedy.

Drama surrounds our lives in too-proliferate bounty. How can we understand the significance of each rain-forest-chaotic second ticking by? Immersed in a play, we have someone else to discover the significance for us; what we see and hear is selected, filtered, and precisely demonstrated. Our perception layers under the playwright's perception for a brief time as his words are in our mouths. A play is a picture frame around a small collection of events and people. Look at these, says the playwright, and the life outside the the frame is temporarily irrelevant.

For all of us, inside the theater or out, reality is built from the stories we tell about it. Is this not the power of worship? A play lasts a few months before we disassemble the frame, but churches have permanent walls. The words of worship in our mouths, week after week, become our own, and our performance layers deeper for all of life. The pageant of liturgy and communion frames and reframes our sense of significance and meaning each Sunday. While other plays mirror and construct a temporary and limited reality, worship is the most profound and eternal reality that we can at this time experience. The bread and wine are not mere props, but spiritual nourishment. The liturgical roles we play are our truest selves. Paradigm merges with experience, performance and personality woven tightly and rightly together for ever.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:08:09 GMT

so, about life. It's swooshing by.
My roommates and I really are going to England. We've bought plane tickets and arranged most of our stay. We still need train and hostel plans to fall into place, as well as one more host home (in Wales). Summer seems forever away and just a week at the same time.
I lived in a cabin with no running water and an out-house half of last week. I spent most of the time by the fire reading because it was so cold, and have decided we all make our lives much to complicated.
The spring plays are next week. My Grove City stage debut. weird. After that, children's theater and the One Acts should keep me busy.

Where did it all go?

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:53:33 GMT

All the people I meet are advertising themselves.

Some of them are selling for volume of buyers.
that Budwieser guy for ESPN, and the same woman in a thousand laundry detergent commercials.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Don't you want to wash stains out of your son's soccer uniform
in a sunny house with wooden floors?
Others want only the chosen to recognize their worth, a discerning club (just large enough) of aren't-we-....
Subliminal signals, and sometimes not as.
Flavor of sharp cheese.
--You too? That's so funny. I didn't know anyone else...!
(Oh, didn't you?)
--Let's be friends in the face of the horde.

Sometimes, I wish I could.
When you met me, you would know.
Take-up or drop. Flatter or ignore.
You aren't even used to that much conscious thought, are you?
If a commercial doesn't capture your attention,
You don't buy the product, most of you.

But I can't.
The habit of neutrality and observation is too strong now.
I look interesting.
The club is intrigued, but to be taken up there you also must have (consciously) un-self-conscious good taste.
I don't.
It's only laundry detergent wife in miniature, with a moleskin journal and bands you've never heard of.
In a month, the moleskin will have become laundry detergent and the signal to buy will be something else.
You will claim you did it first, but it won't matter.
And the populists, I'm there to listen when the image shatters.
But I've never wanted to look like it.

The verdict?
"You're an exotic dresser, but without an exotic personality."
Well, it's what I've revealed, but rather irritating.
I don't think I'm merely a mouse in a colorful sarong.

I just hate marketing, that's all.

Saturday, February 09, 2008

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 09:56:18 GMT

Snow drips fatly across my windowpanes. I can only see it when it silhouettes against the tree branches behind. Otherwise, it is the same color as the sky